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<p>Recognising and estimating gestures is a fundamental aspect towards translating from a sign language to a spoken language. It is a challenging problem and at the same time, a growing phenomenon in Computer Vision. This thesis presents two approaches, an example-based and a learning-based approach, for performing integrated detection, segmentation and 3D estimation of the human upper body from a single camera view. It investigates whether an upper body pose can be estimated from a database of exemplars with labelled poses. It also investigates whether an upper body pose can be estimated using skin feature extraction, Support Vector Machines (SVM) and a 3D human body model. The example-based and learning-based approaches obtained success rates of 64% and 88%, respectively. An analysis of the two approaches have shown that, although the learning-based system generally performs better than the example-based system, both approaches are suitable to recognise and estimate upper body poses in a South African sign language recognition and translation system.</p>

This thesis is structured into four sections. The first section is a brief statement on the choice of the text chosen for the purpose of translation. Ityala Lamawele is one of the old and classic Xhosa texts and after seeing some translated texts either from Xhosa to English or English to Xhosa such as Uhambo Lomhambi (The Pilgrim's Progress) Ingqumbo Yeminyanya (The Wrath of the Ancestors), Akusekho Konwaba (No Longer at Ease) and having not seen any translation of Ityala Lamawele, I felt an attempt at translating Ityala Lamawele was long overdue. This first section also looks at the theoretical aspects of translation that will inform the translation of ltyala Lamawele. The second section is the actual translation (the process and the product) of selected extracts which deal specifically and exclusively with the case of the twins. Though the translation of the whole text is not a remote possibility or consideration, for the purpose of this thesis, selected extracts will be dealt with. The third section of this thesis is the reflection on and the discussion of the choices I have made. This section looks at the process of translating ltyala Lamawele, the challenges and obstacles that I have come across, the way I have put and expressed issues and why. / Thesis (M.A.) - University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2002.

This thesis presents an edition of Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God, a late Middle English devotional prose text for which no critical edition is currently available. I have transcribed and collated the text from all sixteen extant manuscripts and the 1506 printed edition. An investigation of the errors and variants according to the classical method of textual criticism has yielded little in the way of conclusive results, and it has therefore not proved possible to construct a stemma of manuscripts from the corpus of evidence as it now exists. My edition therefore uses one manuscript (Maidstone MS Museum 6) as a base; I emend the text of Maidstone where necessary, and cite variants from all the other witnesses to show all differences of substance. A full critical apparatus is provided, comprising: the text with variants, textual notes and glossary. The introduction includes a full description of all the manuscripts and the two early printed editions, an outline of the methods of textual criticism applied and their results, and an explanation of the choice of base manuscript; information about the language of the Maidstone manuscript and the date of the text are also provided, as is an outline of my editorial principles. The thesis also contains two appendices. The first of these deals briefly with the twenty-two instances where individual chapters of Contemplations appear in other manuscript compilations; the second discusses the English and Latin prayers which follow the full text in some manuscripts.

The Central African Republic is a small country located in the center of Africa. It is a very young nation in terms of political independence, but as the CAR emerges as a nation, it has begun to produce valuable authors who write for the French speaking world. This thesis is an attempt to bring part of the CAR's literature to the United States.Le Silence de la Foret was written by Etienne Goyemide and not only describes the culture of the mainstream population of the CAR, but also that of Pygmies. Although the book is a novel, the cultural aspects are not fictitious. This thesis is a translation of Goyemide's novel into English so that it can be made accessible to the English speaking world.The process of translating such a literary work required and increased knowledge and understanding of both French and English. In attempting to capture the style and tone of the author, careful attention was given to such aspects as tense, syntactic structures, register and vocabulary. A chapter of the thesis is devoted to describing the problems encountered during translation and the reasoning for the translations chosen. / Department of English

The reception of the works written by Roland Barthes in North America can be appreciated by examining editions, rééditions, collections of papers, commentaries and critical approaches. The thesis presents a bibliography of editions and translations in the United States and Canada. It provides an analysis of the portrait drawn by selection and interpretation of the foremost French critic, dead in 1980.

Analyses of Eighteenth-century French translations of English literature have often been reduced to criticizing so-called "belles infideles". Thus, the complexity of translation and ideological issues has been ignored. The first translations of works by Swift and Pope partake in this tradition as inherited from the Eighteenth century, but they also lay down the groundwork for the Enlightenment. Translating Swiftian satire in Gulliver's Travels , Pope's "badinage" in The Rape of the Lock, Clifton's medical history in the context of Newton's ideas, or social satire in Joseph Andrews, regardless of the degree of "fidelity", is never an innocent process. These issues are coupled with formal ones, translational as well as esthetic, when poetry or the Eighteenth-century novel-style texts are translated. / The importance of the Abbe Desfontaines (1685--1745) is undeniable. As a journalist, he comments, criticizes, and analyses not only the translations of English texts, but also the movement along which English ideas are translated within the French system. His numerous satirical texts also reveal him positioning himself before of the issues of the time. Allowing himself more freedom as a translator, he belongs to the first ones to proceed to the translation of English literature between 1727 and 1743. / In his translations, he adapts, imitates, or censors some elements seen as unacceptable in French. He has therefore been considered to be an "unfaithful translator", a position that does not account for his translation project which it is described in the important paratextual apparatus of his translations. His title pages, and especially his dedications, forewords, and introductions, reveal him as being aware of the most polemical aspects of these texts. So as to avoid the impasse encountered in criticizing the "fidelity" of his translations, I have focused on his paratextual apparatus in order to define his translation project and poetics.

The Mill on the Floss, by Victorian novelist George Eliot, is a polylinguistic novel in Bakhtine's sense of the word in that it integrates the linguistic diversity of the society which it depicts. This novel published in 1860 was translated six times into French but never enjoyed a great reception in France. We examine three translations in this thesis: the first is by Francois D'Albert-Durade (1863), the second is by Lucienne Molitor (1957) and the last is by Alain Jumeau (2003). / D'Albert-Durade's translation evacuates the linguistic diversity in order to shape the novel to the requirements of the target literary polysystem. Molitor, by homogenising the eliotian prose, turns the canonised English novel into a French popular novel. Jumeau, for his part, by rehabilitating the peasant sociolect in his translation, marks the beginning of a rehabilitation movement of George Eliot in France. This study, through the analysis of the voice of a few key characters, attempts to follow the French "translative journey" of The Mill on the Floss.

Divided into six chapters, our thesis examines the translation of Evgenyi Onegin, a novel in verse by Aleksandr Pushkin, in France and Japan in the 20th century. In Chapter 1, we introduce our methodological approach, including the eight elements of our translation analysis: the by-who, the who, the what, the for-who, the when, the why, the where, and the how. In Chapter 2, after a brief biography of the Russian poet, we examine his central work Evgenyi Onegin, and its unique structuro-phono-semantic synthesis. The first French mention of Pushkin was in the 19th century, and the 'transfer-related discourse' of that period is the focus of Chapter 3, particularly its creation of the myth of the poet's untranslatability, which would influence translators of the Pushkinian novel into the 20 th century. In Chapter 4, we examine the 11 French translations produced between 1902 and 1996. Because the Japanese discovery of foreign literature---and Pushkin---was the product of political changes during the Meiji period (1868-1912), it is paramount that we examine the pivotal role of 19 th century ideological discourse in which translation is viewed as a means and a condition for the country's modernization. Finally, in Chapter 6, we turn our attention to the 8 Japanese translations of the Pushkinian work produced between 1921 and 1996. Our aim is to demonstrate how the spatio-temporal change influenced the view of translation in general, and translations of Pushkin in particular.

Bibliography: leaves 199-231. / 231 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 1997